News

Celebrating our 60 year anniversary: 1977 to 1987 ~ our third decade

Posted May 1 2017

Our third decade in business was definitely one of the most challenging!

The fire in the 70s

One night in the late 1970’s, a fire started on the 2nd floor of the Colson Building. This fire was in a storage closet next to Frank’s Employment and spread into the office before it could be contained. Everything was destroyed. All the furniture and all the written records of applicants and client companies were gone. There were no longer payroll records or paychecks to pay the people working on temporary assignments. There was no longer a record of invoices to customers. There was no longer contact information for applicants, employees or customers. There were no longer tax or corporate records.

Ruby Frank said; “Fortunately, the temps were understanding and allowed us time to gather replacement checks. The companies we worked with were honest and told us how much they owed.”

The only thing saved from the fire was Ruby’s little black book. She hand wrote the name and phone number of everyone available for temporary work in her book and kept it with her at all times, so if a customer called her in the evening with an emergency, she could make calls from home and set someone up to work the next morning.

Shortly after that, Ruby fell on an icy sidewalk and broke both her wrists. She cursed her bad luck but pressed on because that’s the kind of person and businesswoman Ruby was.

An office was available on the 2nd floor of the State Bank Building, now BMO Harris, so Ruby moved her staffing agency there. Within a year, Lester Norris said he had a nice office suite in his Arcada Building available “…and by the way, if you are interested in buying the building, I’ll make you a good deal.”

Frank’s Employment moved into the Arcada. Ruby assembled a group of 6 local businessmen who, along with her, each contributed to purchase the building in 1980. Ruby added property management to her growing list of business skills.

A different kind of fire in the 80s

In the mid-80’s, Frank’s Employment bought its first computer; an IBM PC XT with dual 256K floppy drives. They developed a custom program that would store basic information on the growing list of job applicants and perform searches for people when jobs needed to be filled. This changed the amount of time it took to search applicant files from a few minutes to a matter of mere hours, when you included the time needed for programming. It was, however, an important step into the computer age for business, employment, human resources, and staffing.